Wednesday, April 2, 2014

PANYNJ Needs A Major Shakeup, But Not A Split-up

UPDATED: Fixed a broken link to the NYT article.

The report, released on Tuesday from the Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management at New York University, says the agency spent more than $800 million from 2002 to 2012 on “regional projects” chosen by the governors’ offices. In the coming years, the pace of spending on zero-return state projects is expected to accelerate. As a result, the most powerful testaments to the agency’s peril, according to former agency officials and transportation experts, are not found amid the bridge access lanes of Fort Lee, N.J. They can be traced to the grounds of industrial parks built in the Bronx and in Yonkers, with little obvious transportation purpose, or along the Pulaski Skyway, which the agency agreed to rehabilitate after Mr. Christie canceled the construction of a rail tunnel beneath the Hudson River in 2010 and claimed billions in planned spending to be New Jersey’s money.

The Port Authority is a tremendous vehicle for infrastructure planning and execution in the New York harbor region, which has been arbitrarily split by a political border for centuries.

We still haven't accomplished what the PANYNJ was originally created to do: build a freight rail tunnel between NY and NJ. But we should. In the meantime the PA has gotten away from its core mission and spent freely on non-core projects. This is where the reform is needed:

Good idea: Get the PA focused back on its core mission: the infrastructure for moving people and goods around the region.Atrocious idea: Christie's suggestion of splitting the authority up along that same artificial political boundary that already divides America's foremost metropolitan area is ludicrously bad.